"A truly brilliant biography."--John Kenneth Galbraith, Chicago Tribune
Twice jailed while serving in office yet a champion of the people, builder of schools yet a shameless grafter, James Michael Curley was the stuff of legend long before his life became fiction in Edwin O''Connor''s classic novel The Last Hurrah. As mayor of Boston, as a United States congressman, as governor of Massachusetts, Curley rose from the slums of South Boston in a career extending from the Progressive Era of Teddy Roosevelt to the ascendancy of the Kennedy sons. While Curley lived, he represented both the triumph of Irish Americans and the birth of divisive politics of ethnic and racial polarization; when he died, over one million mourners turned out to pay their respects in the largest wake Boston had ever seen.
Nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography, Beatty''s spellbinding story of "the Kingfish of Massachusetts" is also an epic of his city, its immigrant people, and its turbulent times. It is simply biography at its best.
"Beatty''s book is a delight--rich, witty, flowing, and full of insight about the nature of political corruption."--Constance Casey, Los Angeles Times
"A panoramic, exquisitely incisive biography that illuminates the triumphs, debacles, and personal sorrows of the irrepressible man known as Boston''s ''Mayor of the Poor.''"--Robert Wilson, USA Today
Industry Reviews
A delightful and shrewd biography of four-time Boston Mayor James Michael Curley, the sinner-saint whose "shamrock politics" made his Irish-Catholic supporters cheer and his WASP opponents sputter with rage for half a century. As portrayed by Beatty, a senior editor of The Atlantic, Curley was more complicated than the charmingly roguish big-city mayor of Edwin O'Connor's thinly fictionalized The Last Hurrah. Beatty pays this moat colorful of politicians the ultimate tribute by taking his career seriously. To be sure, the author has a full quota of rollicking anecdotes (e.g., Curley's quip that a ramp built by one of his pet contractors had collapsed because of "an injudicious mixture of sand and cement"). Yet Beatty thinks it a mistake to see Curley as an old-style machine politician. Instead, Curley foreshadowed today's "entrepreneurial candidate": A lone-wolf professional politician, he ran in 32 elections, serving as congressman, governor, and Boston's mayor. Moreover, Curley resembled Marion Barry in using his virtuoso talent for playing upon ethnic resentment to fend off outcries against flagrant corruption (curley served two jail terms, and as governor purged political opponents and paroled and pardoned convicted killers). Beatty's balance sheet on this gifted but flawed politician is detailed and just. On the plus side stood Curley's rococo oratory; his building of such major institutions as the Boston City Hospital; his farsighted advocacy of programs later embodied in the New Deal and the Great Society; and his emphasis on work instead of welfare for constituents. On the other side, his graft; arrogance toward those he claimed to serve as "Mayor of the Poor"; and responsibility for sending Boston into long-term decline by soaking the city's businesses with taxes to pay for municipal improvements. Funny, fair-minded, and refreshingly novel in finding contemporary relevance in a poi long dismissed as an anachronism of the boss era. (Kirkus Reviews)
